AI Startup Aims to Eliminate Cold Calling Struggles for Sales Professionals

As the Director of Sales Development at a legal software company, Tony De Leon spent countless hours cold calling potential clients, only to be met with voicemail after voicemail. It was a frustrating and repetitive task. From searching for the right phone numbers and researching prospects, to taking notes and logging calls—his days were filled with busywork.

“By the time you finally connect with someone, you're so caught off guard,” De Leon shared in an interview with *Forbes*. “You forget everything you’ve learned, and it’s like, ‘Oh my God, they actually picked up!’”

That all changed when De Leon started using Nooks, an AI-powered sales platform designed to automate the most tedious tasks. Nooks helps sales teams streamline activities like finding contact information, leaving voicemail messages, writing follow-up emails, and conducting research. The platform’s automated dialing assistant increased De Leon’s daily conversation count from just two to ten—a significant boost to his sales pipeline, which is the process of converting leads into customers.

“Sales pipeline is crucial to our company's success” said Daniel, Nooks-CEO.

Nooks Raises $43 Million in Series B Funding

Nooks, co-founded by Daniel Lee, Rohan Suri, and Nikhil Cheerla in 2020, has raised $43 million in Series B funding. The funding round was led by Kleiner Perkins, with additional support from Tola Capital and angel investor. With a total of $70 million in funding, Nooks is now valued at $285 million. According to Lee, the startup has quadrupled its revenue year over year for the past two years, driven by its growing user base, which includes sales representatives from companies like Fivetran and Amplitude.

How Nooks’ AI Tools Are Changing Sales

Nooks’ platform uses AI models from established companies like OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT) and Google’s Gemini. These models have been trained on a massive database of 100 million anonymized sales conversations. The platform also offers coaching tools, where AI roleplays as potential customers to help salespeople practice their pitches and get feedback on how to improve.

Competing with Industry Giants

Nooks is up against large tech companies like Salesforce and Microsoft, both of which have developed their own AI-powered tools for sales professionals. Microsoft, for example, announced this week that it plans to introduce 10 AI agents capable of handling routine tasks, including those related to sales functions.

A Bright Future for Nooks and Sales Teams

Leigh Marie Braswell, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, who led the firm’s investment in Nooks, said she first met Lee while both were working at Scale AI, a company valued at $14 billion that provides data and software to train AI models. Braswell believes that businesses are looking for tools that boost employee productivity and drive revenue—beyond just impressive demonstrations. She is hopeful that Nooks will deliver on this promise for sales teams, enabling them to spend more time on high-value tasks and less on manual, repetitive work.

“The sales job is inherently human—strategic work like closing deals and building relationships,” Braswell said. “The company gives sales people more time to focus on that.”